Slashdot Mirror
Sell Someone Else's Book On Lulu!
Albert Schueller writes "Lulu is a place where authors can self-publish their books. It's a nice response to exorbitant college textbook prices. In an interesting twist, looks like you might be able to get away with selling other people's books on Lulu and reap a tidy profit. The Lulu offering Calculus Twirly Exponentials by Dave Stuart appears to be simply a high quality scan of the much more well-known, and expensive, Calculus: Early Transcendentals 6th ed. by James Stewart. Compare the preview images available for each at Lulu and Amazon respectively."
That sounds legal...
Is that they want $170 for a book on calculus.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Sounds like a good way to get sued.
1. Publish someone else's book on Lulu
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
4. Get sued!
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Sounds like all in a day's work for your average middleman. Good job!
MAFIAA go after casual downloaders, destroying people for having downloaded a few songs which are usually freely available on the radio anyway. In the meantime, people are scanning and selling other people's books for profit - and getting away with it. Wasn't this exactly the sort of thing that copyright was supposed to prevent in the first place?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
>>>we have what amounts to a protest over the cost of the original book...
Bullshit. It's theft of another person's labor. Equivalent to if you spend a year of your life as an engineer, but you only get half the pay. The other half gets distributed among thieves claiming credit for your work, even though they didn't do a damn thing. They are parasites... nothing more.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I've refreshed to make sure it's not a temporary bug with Lulu that has been fixed. It happens every time.
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A little off topic I guess, but how did college professors get around the ethical challenge of selling their own books to their class as a requirement and charging whatever they felt like for it?
~S
They downplay it by never using or even mentioning the required book in class.
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Even worse is that many university bookstores will mark up prices above the MSRP. I remember once as a student I found the exact same book in both the Textbooks section and the normal bookstore area. The one in Textbooks was 20% more expensive. And they wonder why students started buying their books on Amazon.
Got Apathy?
The other half gets distributed among thieves claiming credit for your work, even though they didn't do a damn thing. They are parasites... nothing more.
So....it follows the middle management model?
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It's tricky, because professors often do have a reasonably good justification. I mean, of all the physics textbooks out there, presumably the one the prof wrote himself is the one that covers the material closest to the way he thinks it should be covered. It's also almost certainly the textbook whose contents he's most familiar with, whose exercises he can most reliably answer questions about, etc.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
On page 12 of the Lulu scan, the author discusses the relation of his book to "Calculus: Early Transcendentals" and explains that he is attempting to provide an alternate which exactly follows the topics and formats of the original so that students can us it as a less-costly substitute. I didn't go beyond that so maybe it's a scan, but the author does address the issue.
I'm not really outraged by the person who posted the book on Lulu for profit. I'm outraged by the fact that anyone would pay good money for a pirated textbook...especially when you can get it here. This is unacceptable, people! Learn to Internet!
>>>we have what amounts to a protest over the cost of the original book...
Bullshit. It's theft of another person's labor. Equivalent to if you spend a year of your life as an engineer, but you only get half the pay. The other half gets distributed among thieves claiming credit for your work, even though they didn't do a damn thing. They are parasites... nothing more.
No, the parasites are the ones who change the edition of the book every 6-12 months, making the used book market nonexistant and allowing for inflation like this (usually in the realm of kickbacks to teachers/schools to "encourage" them to cycle out the editions on command).
$225 list price for a goddamned math book? Apparently selling textbooks allows for some really high quality drugs.
Having said that, note that the article submitter's name first comes up on Google as a Math Professor in Washington State who teaches Calculus 3. Even more amusing is the fact that Whitman's Math Department uses Lulu to sell their own line of College math books.
Let me interject real quick with the statement that I do not intend to suggest any shenanigans -- I just thought it was really unusual. In a good way. I've never heard of a college designing, testing, and printing their own textbooks -- and at vastly better prices ($9 instead of $225) to boot! And that's assuming you don't just want to download the PDF for your iPad or whatnot.
The preview doesn't seem to let you go further than page 12, so I can't say for sure, but that explanation appears to be a smoke screen to hide the fact that it is in fact a copy of Calculus: Early Transcendentals. The copyright page is definitely taken from the original textbook and the table of contents appears to be as well.
I've had this happen to me, with a copylefted textbook I wrote. I think the situation was simply that the guy who did it knew the book was freely available as a PDF, but didn't realize it was possible to buy a copy in print, so he just set it up on lulu so he could produce one copy for himself. Can't remember if he was complying with all the terms of the license or not. I contacted him about it, he explained what he was trying to do, and we straightened everything out. I think lulu had by default put him as the author, since the book was made on his account, but he wasn't intentionally trying to claim authorship of my work.
Anyway, this seems like the biggest non-story ever. Lulu is a print-on-demand publishing business. They're one of these online businesses that is able to make a profit because they have no human beings paid to interact with customers on a one-to-one basis. I use them for my books, and I'm fairly happy with them, although there have been a few hassles here and there. When you set up a book to be produced and sold by lulu, you upload a pdf and click through on a form that says you agree to a certain contract. The contract says that you have to be the copyright owner. Sounds like whoever put these scans online clicked through the contract, but is violating it. Nobody at lulu reads your book when you upload it. They're not a full-service publishing house with acquisition editors, copy editors, etc. Whoever posted the slashdot story could have just clicked on the "Report This Content to Lulu" link and told them it was a copyright violation, and presumably lulu would have dealt with the issue. But I guess it's more fun to have the story run on slashdot.
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Thank you very much for bringing this to our attention. Claiming copyrighted material as your own is a clear violation of our policies and we are pulling down this content from our site right now. If at any time you come across questionable material on our site, please do not hesitate to contact me at jcox@lulu.com.
Are you telling me that people can use technology to infringe copyrights?! Why haven't I heard about this before?! How is this even possible?
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
When I was in school they'd frequently assign books that were never used in the course. I started saving hundreds of dollars by not buying books until I absolutely needed them.
I think professors let their course change and shift semester after semester, end up stopping using a book but still require it... Meanwhile, the publishers laugh their way to the bank... :P
What irks me most about textbooks is the "editions" scam. Every year or two a "new" edition comes out which makes the "old" edition not usable in the current course. The scam is that there is very little difference between the "new" edition and the "old" edition; just enough to change page numbers and a few examples. The worst part is that there is no need for a new calculus book; how much has first year calculus changed in 12 months?
Elsewhere in the world, perhaps. In the United States, they insert it for you while you're walking through Security at the airport.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
If you would like to see a detailed case study of an experiment into this effect, please look up "America"
Or, you know, you could maybe try traveling to America.
Who'd want to do that?
But that's wrong. You have the correct definition for Spanish, then incorrectly assume that it's the same in English. It is not. The etymology may be from Spanish, but the English word "America" does not refer to The Americas (or the two continents of North American and South America collectively). That your Spanish roots prevent you from learning English correctly will never change that fact.
Your country stole the name, and made you all believe that they came up with it.
That is incorrect, as, having visited other English speaking countries, the rule holds true outside just the USA. It is you who does not understand English and mistakenly applies a Spanish definition to an English word, then pompously assert to many native speakers that they don't know their own language, even when your definition is the one that's wrong.
Why do you think your country is named the united states OF America? Because it is a bunch of states that are within a bigger place called America. That's fucking why.
So The United States of Mexico is named after a larger place called Mexico, and it's wrong to call them Mexicans? Just give it up, you are an idiot.
Learn to love Alaska
As a person who's breaking into the book market with my wife's new novel and seeking an eBook option, this is precisely the sort of crap that we're worried about, just all too easy through modern POD portals like Lulu.
As a person who's breaking into the book market with your wife's new novel and seeking an eBook option, this is precisely the sort of crap I'm relying on
Ebook piracy shows no such thing. What is shows is that when your trying to sell something in a market where the cost to copy is nil, then your business model is broken.
When you buy an e-book, you're not paying for the cost to copy. You're paying for the value of the content. Intellectual property does have value.
Artificial scarcity on the internet is simply impossible and at best all you can hope for is to get people to pay for convenience.
The price of a book has nothing to do with scarcity. It's the value of the ideas in the book that create the value. The value of the materials, even for a hardcover book, are negligible in the cost.
Obviously writers can't make money through concerts or t-shirts; but there will always be a market for those of us of enjoy real, physical books. There is also a market for public speakers, many of whom are writers. Does this mean that all writers will be able to make a living? No. However it's neither reasonable nor feasible to allow everyone to make a living doing what they enjoy.
I certainly agree that all writers aren't entitled to make a living doing it, if they can't get people to buy their books. But that doesn't justify stealing. By all means, if you don't think someone's work is worth buying, don't buy it, but then don't read it, either. If it's good enough to read, it's good enough to pay for. The idea that, "If I can figure out a way to steal it, you don't deserve to get paid for it" is, frankly, sociopathic.
The price of a book has nothing to do with scarcity. It's the value of the ideas in the book that create the value.
Ahh, that explains why books with really good ideas are so much more expensive than books with bad ideas.